Boot times
Until now, all of our tests have been conducted with the SSDs connected as secondary storage. This next batch uses them as system drives.

We'll start with boot times measured two ways. The bare test depicts the time between hitting the power button and reaching the Windows desktop, while the loaded test adds the time needed to load four applications—Avidemux, LibreOffice, GIMP, and Visual Studio Express—automatically from the startup folder. Our old boot tests focused on the time required to load the OS, but these new ones cover the entire process, including drive initialization.

The Trions both are on the bottom end of the boot time rankings, but that only means there's a two-second gap between them and the fastest booters. The Trion 150's boot speed is virtually no different than the 100's.

Load times
Next, we'll tackle load times with two sets of tests. The first group focuses on the time required to load larger files in a collection of desktop applications. We open a 790MB 4K video in Avidemux, a 30MB spreadsheet in LibreOffice, and a 523MB image file in GIMP. In the Visual Studio Express test, we open a 159MB project containing source code for the LLVM toolchain. Thanks to Rui Figueira for providing the project code.

No surprises here. There are no appreciable difference in how long it takes any of these drives to load our productivity applications. Last up is a quick look at game loading times.

The Trion 150 loads all three games about as fast as Samsung's 950 Pro, a PCIe monster with much higher specs. If you haven't picked up on this trend yet, I'll be blunt: if your use case is primarily gaming, don't scrimp and save so you can shell out for a high-end SSD.

Across our boot and load testing, the Trion 150 put on a similar showing to the Trion 100 (and all the other drives, for that matter). The real-world performance increases that OCZ touts are a bit less tangible here than they were in our RoboBench tests.

That's it for performance testing. Read on for a breakdown of our hardware and test methods.